(Credit: Shutterstock / Lost_in_the_Midwest)
Last week, we heard about a group of San Francisco residents who were kept awake by 4 a.m. honking from a nearby Waymo lot. The company has since rolled out a fix, but one of the building's bleary-eyed residents still plans to grill Vishay Nihalani, Waymo's Director of Product Management & Operations, on her livestream about her noisy neighbors.
Residents of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood recently complained about a parking lot where Waymo vehicles wait between rides. When the cars backed into spaces, they would set off the sensors in nearby vehicles, causing them to honk. It sounds innocent enough until you find out that the honking happens pretty much 24/7, including at night.
Earlier this week, Waymo issued a fix to reduce the honking. The first attempt involved sending the vehicles to an adjacent cul-de-sac, which actually resulted in more honking; however, a second fix should "keep the noise down for our neighbors moving forward.”
Sophia Tung, who has been running a 24/7 livestream of the Waymo parking lot, is the resident who will be chatting with Nihalani about the robotaxi.
"The idea is to talk about what went wrong with all the honking at 4AM, how they fixed it, and what does it look like to run Waymo as an operation, as well as the engineering of how the cars work and see," she said on Reddit, where she's taking suggestions on other things to ask.
Watch the chat on Tung’s YouTube Live on Monday at 2:30 p.m. PT / 5:30 p.m. ET.